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Energy boost from up north

There have been lots of talk here in Canada on US-Canada relations. I believe, Canadians are way too concerned about this. I do understand the economical dependence on business from the US but, hey, US needs energy, lots of it and Canada has it. Maybe in future Canada is more self-confident about this: You wanna have our natural gas? Well, then play to OUR rules or at least stop flaming us! Good friends should respect the other’s arguments.

Welcome to The PMA OnLine Power Report The United States slurps up more oil and natural gas from Canada than any other foreign country on Earth.

And with war raging in the Middle East, civil uprisings in other oil producing countries and a recent decision not to drill in a sensitive U.S. Arctic wildlife refuge in Alaska, even greater demand for Canadian energy is expected. The daily flow of Canadian oil to the U.S. has increased dramatically over the last few years and almost double the quantity from a decade ago.

Canada is now second only to Saudi Arabia as a source of imported oil for the United States, which imported 1.8 billions per day from the Saudis in January and 1.6 million barrels per day from its northern neighbour. When imports of natural gas are included, the importance of Canada as an energy source for the United States becomes even more apparent. Canada supplied about 94 per cent of American gas imports last year.

Bush the real deal

In times like these, never forget to check ‘The Onion‘. read the entire thing — Bush, yeah, that man is da bomb!

The Onion | Bush Bravely Leads 3rd Infantry Into Battle IRAQ-KUWAIT BORDER—As the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division began its ground assault on Iraq Monday, President Bush marched alongside the front-line soldiers, bravely putting his own life on the line for his country by personally participating in the attack.

“Bush is the real deal, and when he talks about fighting for freedom, he means it,” said Pvt. Tom Scharpling, 21. “He’d never ask one of us grunts to take any risks for our country that he wasn’t willing to take himself.”

…

“The Joint Chiefs of Staff kept telling him, ‘Mr. President, we beg you—stay here in Washington, where it’s safe.’ But George was having none of it,” said Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, commander of the 3rd Infantry. “He was adamant that if our boys overseas were going to risk their lives for liberty, he was going to do the same. And, by God, he proved himself a man of his word.”

The president has only been in battle for less than a week, but he has already proven himself more than willing to put himself in the line of fire.

“The president carried me through an enemy minefield after my arm had been blown off by a mortar shell, blazing away with his pistol as he delivered me to safety,” Pvt. Chris Adair said. “Then, after he’d gotten me to a medic, he went all the way back through that same minefield—carrying a 40-pound bag of ice the whole way—to retrieve my severed arm so the doctors could sew it back on. Now, thanks to President Bush, I’ll still be able to play piano for the church choir back home in Appleton, just like I promised Grandma. He is truly an American hero.”

…

“There may be some folks out there, born silver spoon in hand, who’d act that way, but that ain’t Bush. No, that ain’t Bush,” Elkins said. “He ain’t no fortunate son.”

The free world

interesting read; the author argues that ideology (of the hawks) may have been the most compelling reason for a war..the other two reasons…guess…oil and 9/11 — follow his argumentation. makes sense to me.

D.C. Dispatch | 2003.03.26 | Schneider Political Pulse

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And so, reason No. 3 is ideology.

Influential neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, have been arguing for years in favor of an assertive U.S. strategy in the post-Cold War world. In 1997, they and other like-minded intellectuals organized the Project for the New American Century, which urged then-President Clinton to confront Iraq. “America was being too timid, too weak, and too unassertive in the post-Cold War world,” Kristol argues. “American leadership was key to, not only world stability, but any hope for spreading democracy and freedom around the world.”

Hartcher says, “This [war] is about the neoconservative view, the idealistic view, the Wilsonian view, that the world would be a better place if only America can make it that way.”The neoconservatives advocate a paradigm shift in which the United States spreads American values by asserting American power—by force, if necessary.

The neoconservative champion is Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., now an ardent supporter of war with Iraq. “We must keep our nerve,” McCain said last month, “have the courage to understand what our experiences have taught us, have faith in the necessity and rightness of our cause, and do what must be done to make this a safer, freer, better world.”

Has Bush adopted their cause? Apparently. In his February 26 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, “By the resolve and purpose of America and our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history. And free people will keep the peace of the world.”

This week

now, take a big breath and jump right in into this weekly review in Harper’s magazine. Click on the link to read the full thing…take a long breath now..

Many hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the war in cities all over the world. Protests in San Francisco were particularly lively. One group of protesters vomited on the sidewalk in front of a federal building after drinking large quantities of red, white, and blue milk; others pulled out mats and practiced yoga in front of the police. A federal park ranger tried to run over protesters in his truck and then attempted to run down a reporter. One protester apparently committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Police were repeatedly videotaped attacking demonstrators with clubs and pepper spray. Protesters were also observed beating police officers. Fifteen law firms in Bellingham, Washington, posted signs in their windows reading “Closed in honor of those now being killed in Iraq.” Small pro-war demonstrations were held around the country as well. Vandenberg Air Force Base in California let it be known that deadly force might be used against peace activists who attempt to infiltrate the base. Israeli schoolchildren took their gas masks to school. Congress debated next year’s budget, which contains nothing to pay for the war in Iraq but does call for more tax cuts for the wealthy, guaranteeing record deficits for at least the next decade. Three Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to cut $100 billion from the tax cuts to help pay for the war. CIA analysts continued to complain to reporters that the Bush Administration was distorting intelligence reports on Iraq to bolster its war policy; analysts were particularly embarrassed when President Bush publicly claimed that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.

The Other Superpower — the rest of the world

The Other Superpower Rumsfeld promised a “campaign unlike any other in history.” What he did not plan or expect, however, was that the peoples of earth–what some are calling “the other superpower”–would launch an opposing campaign destined to be even less like any other in history. Indeed, Rumsfeld’s campaign, a military attack, was in all its essential elements as old as history. The other campaign–the one opposing the war–meanwhile, was authentically novel. In the pages that follow, The Nation gives a snapshot of it in fourteen countries. If news has anything to do with what is new, then this campaign’s birth and activity are the real news. What emerges is a portrait of a world in resistance.

Rehearsal space for war

Orion > Discourse and Dissent “If you depend on the news for your worldview, friends, you’re in a sad place.” Garrison Keillor 11/9/02

…

by Alison Hawthorne Deming

East of Gila Bend two jets release payloads

that billow the desert dirt, rehearsal space for war

is what the desert means to military minds, a meaning

the civilian mind will never understand, as it walks

through the details of the day: buy bananas, check

bank balance, water plants. There is a god that lives

in the weapons, a power that exists in the mind

capable of imagining that to slaughter people

is a just way to solve injustice. What fool or monster

would instruct children to launch bombs upon the bully

terrrorizing a crowded playground? To be a fool or monster

is to believe there is only one way. Avenging genocide

is an expensive means of focusing the mind.

The civilian mind rehearses taking in the wounded,

their faces sinking below the reflective darkness

of public memory, taking in the warriors who will own

forever their elation in battle, the pageantry of war

that comes home and joins the ticker tape parade,

the Disneyland soundstage of victory, a word

that cannot disguise suffering — the smoke and blade

fever of destruction that leaves the living to question,

Was it right, what I did? Was it mine, the choice to quit?

“It was an outrage, an obscenity”

inside perspective from Baghdad in ArabNews, Saudi Arabia’s English daily. Author Robert Fisk is a seasoned English journalist, Middle East correspondent with London’s Independent. Fisk is currently un-embedded in Iraq.

Certainly, there had been an attack less than an hour earlier on a military camp further north. I was driving past the base when two rockets exploded and I saw Iraqi soldiers running for their lives out of the gates and along the side of the highway. Then I heard two more explosions — these were the missiles that hit Abu Taleb Street.

Of course, the pilot who killed the innocent yesterday could not see his victims. Pilots fire through computer-aligned coordinates and the sandstorm yesterday would have hidden the street from his vision. But when one of Malek Hammoud’s friends asked me how the Americans could so blithely kill those they claimed to want to liberate, he didn’t want to learn about the science of avionics or weapons delivery systems. And why should he? For this is happening almost every day in Baghdad.

The truth is that nowhere is safe now in Baghdad and as the Americans and British close their siege of the city in the next few days or hours, that simple message will become ever more real and ever more bloody. We may put on the hairshirt of morality in explaining why theses people should die. They died because of Sept. 11, we may say, because of Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, because of human rights abuses, because of our desperate desire to ‘liberate’ them all. Let us not confuse the issue with oil. Either way, I’ll bet we are told that Saddam is ultimately responsible for their deaths. We shan’t mention the pilot, of course.

an analysis from Russia…check for a different tone compared to your local news.

War in Iraq – fighting the people It is difficult not to not to notice the extremely overstretched frontline of the coalition. This frontline is stretching toward Baghdad through An-Najaf and Karabela and its right flank goes all the way along the Euphrates and is completely exposed. All main supply and communication lines of the coalition are going through unprotected desert. Already the supply routes are stretching for more than 350 kilometers and are used to deliver 800 tonnes of fuel and up to 1,000 tonnes of ammunition, food and other supplies daily to the advancing forces.

If the Iraqis deliver a decisive strike at the base of this front, the coalition will find itself in a very difficult situation, with its main forces, cutoff from the resupply units, losing their combat readiness and mobility and falling an easy pray to the Iraqis.

…

The extreme length of the resupply routes and the actions of the Iraqi reconnaissance units have created a new problem: the coalition command is forced to admit that it has no information about the conditions on the roads. Currently, as intercepted radio communications show, the coalition command is trying to establish the whereabouts of more than 500 of its troops that fell behind their units, departed with resupply convoys or were carrying out individual assignments. So far it was not possible to establish how many of these troops are dead, captured or have successfully reached other units.

Oil vultures already on their way to Iraq

It’s all about the right connections..Former CEO and VP Dick Cheney still receives around one million dollar a year in compensation — this proves to be a good investment, it seems.

Fool.com: Halliburton Charges Into Iraq [The Motley Fool Take] March 25, 2003#Halliburton Halliburton Charges Into Iraq

A division of Halliburton (NYSE: HAL) named Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) has been awarded a contract from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work in Iraq. The size of the contract was not disclosed, but estimates put it near $1 billion.

For now, Halliburton’s KBR unit will douse oil fires in Iraq and repair the country’s weakened or damaged oil production infrastructure, where possible. Responsibilities after the war are yet to be divvied out. Halliburton is also working with the U.S. government in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, and other countries under a 10-year contract from the Pentagon awarded in December 2001.

Halliburton is the first of many U.S. corporations that will surely be asked to help, and profit from, the rebuilding of Iraq. It is an especially auspicious first awardee, however, because Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton until 2000. Upon entering the vice president’s office, Cheney divested himself of his holdings, although he reportedly still receives about $1 million a year in compensation from the company.

IndyMedia Center – news Rachel’s war

This weekend 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip. In a remarkable series of emails to her family, she explained why she was risking her life

How you can help on the home front: Turn on the blusterizer

cool flash cartoon…you’re with us or you’re going to be renamed, “‘blusterrized”: french fries, french toast turns into freedom fries and freedom toast.Sauerkraut turns into liberty leaves, Bejing duck into democracy duck…and russian roulette is going to be resolve roulette..the rest translates into war, war, war ….and in the end of that translation process — all for the “homeland security” — we’ll rename ‘world’ into ‘america’. done. we’re blusterized.

MotherJones.com | Commentary Cartoon By Mark Fiore

Unsure how to support the Bush administration at this critical juncture? Now, you can strike a blow against our enemies by simply reworking your vocabulary.

Street fight in Baghdad going to be bloody

Saddam’s waiting for the US troops in Baghdad. This is going to be a very bloody slaughtering; never forget Stalingrad, 60 years ago.

from this BBC history feature on Stalingrad:

The Germans moved swiftly forward, reaching the banks of the River Volga. The German soldiers of Army Group B had one last major task – to take the city of Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga.

And so began one of the bloodiest and bitterest battles of World War Two. More than 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the city but Stalin initially forbade any evacuation from the city, even of children. Soviet reinforcements had to cross the Volga from the east and many of them drowned under the weight of their clothing and weapons. The infamous Penal Units – some of them political prisoners – took part in suicidal missions as a way of atoning for their ’sins’ and the average life-expectancy of a Soviet private soldier during the battle of Stalingrad was just 24 hours. By the end of the siege, 1 million Soviet soldiers had died on the Stalingrad front.

Now, Saddam admires Hitler and Stalin and I don’t even want to think about exchanging Stalingrad with Baghdad and the river Volga with Tigris. No wonder Germans and Russians are opposed to such a war. Around 250.000 Germans and a million Russian soldiers died there. My grandfather also died in Russia. He wasn’t a Nazi but he didn’t have any choice at this time: Either fight or you get shot. That’s the brutal reality in wars — no more time for timid intellectualizing at this point. We shouldn’t forget that we’re talking about humans dying; increasingly it gets abstract. We talk about dead soldiers like slam dunks at sports events; we keep scores, we keep the distance. Just have a look at al-alzeera to see the ugly face of war and then surf back to your good news channels.

Reuters News Article Retired U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division 12 years ago, said the U.S.-led force faced “a very dicey two to three day battle” as it pushes north toward the Iraqi capital.

..

“In the process if they (the Iraqis) actually fight, and that’s one of the assumptions, clearly it’s going to be brutal, dangerous work and we could take, bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties,” said McCaffrey who became one of the most senior ranking members of the U.S. military following the 1991 war.

“So if they (the Americans and British) are unwilling to face up to that, we may have a difficult time of it taking down Baghdad and Tikrit up to the north west.”

BBC tells Iraqis to stay away from TV and radio broadcasting facilities

German reporters overheard BBC reporters warning Iraqis in Baghdad to stay away from TV and radio broadcasting facilities — looks like communication facilities are going to be the next target of the US troops in Baghdad. Meanwhile, Baghdad is preparing for bloody street fights — while many people are desperately trying to leave Baghdad.